A weird thing I see online from time to time.
There is a weird thing I see online from time to time. A recent example was when someone wrote an article accusing me and David Karp of being assholes for starting a site that made fun of homeless people (which we had nothing to do with):
I am sure Lodwick thinks he is “cool” enough to make this joke. After all, he’s “famous”, at least according to his own blog. (Yes I get the famous thing is probably some inside joke - it just isn’t sufficiently “ironic”).
What is the meaning of the quotation marks around those words? Let’s remove them and see the result.
I am sure Lodwick thinks he is cool enough to make this joke. After all, he’s famous, at least according to his own blog. (Yes I get the famous thing is probably some inside joke - it just isn’t sufficiently ironic).
The second one is a lot more readable with the distracting quotes removed. But do the quotes serve some other purpose? Let’s look at the words he chose to surround them with:
I suppose I would like to be cool, but I don’t claim to be.
I am somewhat famous, and I claim to be.
I rarely do anything ironically, nor do I claim to.
I genuinely do not understand what he is trying to communicate with the quotes. What do these things have in common? What is his motivation?
The “quotes” issue came up again today, from a commenter on Valleywag’s coverage of my new website:
Going with .org is way more ‘edgy’ and against the grain.. he’s so cool, I wish I was his friend.
??? Am I being punished for doing something slightly innovative? Sometimes, someone in a cool outfit walks by, and an angry person will say, “Ha, that guy is trying so hard to look cool.” But in reality, many cool looking people look cool because they are cool, down to the core of their being. The angry person is projecting his own M.O. onto the cool guy, because the angry person thinks being boring is the default for all people, and a deviation from that is a futile, superficial attempt to escape man’s true identity as another face in the crowd.
Maybe someone else has a better explantion.
Maybe you should just “get over yourself”
